Assuming colx to be a non-DATE datatype. Is '12/1/2013' supposed to be numeric, char, or date? And to Oracle, DATE records the day and time in a binary format. TIMESTAMP gets into more precision, and allows time zones.

Background
In several of the companies I have worked for, I noticed that corporate reporting is off loaded from the production database and done mainly on a clone database which needs to be kept up to date daily by various means, be it a logical…

Checking the Alert Log in AWS RDS Oracle can be a pain through their user interface. I made a script to download the Alert Log, look for errors, and email me the trace files. In this article I'll describe what I did and share my script.